Thoughtful Moments

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 8, Issue 87, 6 July 1945, Page 2

Thoughtful Moments

OUR SUNDAY MESSAGE

(Supplied by the Whakat

HOW LIONS CHANGE INTO LAMBS By Dr. Norman. Maclean. The other day I made a great discovery: searching lor one book I found another which I had not opened for 40 years and which 1 had even forgotten that I possessed. This is the two-volume edition of John "Wesley's Journal; I glanced at a page lie re and there, and found myself transported back into the '18th century all alive. For two days and nights 1 companied the- great evangelist up and down the country and listened to his message: "God is love; Christ is love; religion is the life of love and the happiest cheerfulest thing in tile world." At the end of the two days it flashed on me that the Power which transformed Wesley into a living 11 a me, and which as Leeky declares saved lJ ' England from the horrors of the guillotine is *still here waiting to ) > save the world from being utterly destroyed by its own inventions. We are offered many remedies- but these are almost all palliatives, for symptoms. What humanity i.s crying for is a remedj' for the hidden disease: for the heart alienated from God. Man's malady, if we search to the roots is just that: the loss of God.

Now England in the 18th century was very much like Germany now; she had the semblance but had lost the Spirit of Christianity. The industrial civilisation had herded the people into mean towns where the young were without schools and the old. without churches. It. is difficult for us now to realise the degradation. of the poor, the coarseness of the moneyed, and tire vulgarity of the upper classes. It was a brutal age. Walpole, in his journals depicts statesmen worn with drunkreeling into the ferry boat of Charon at forty-five. Hogarth calls London the city of gallows. When Wesley began to preach in the fields and streets he met with so much savagery that lie was often pelted with stones and mud and received many blows. But through the whole record he makes no complaint. "I passed through the midst " he records again and again of an angrj' hostile crowd. Only a born leader of men could ,iave persisted and overcome. On one occasion lie was in dire danger of his life. "I called," he writes, "for a chair. Suddenly the winds were hushed and all were calm and s till; my heart j was tilled with love; my eyes with tears; my mouth with arguments. The leaders were amazed; they were ashamed; they were melted down; they devoured every word." The leader, who had a stone in his was transformed. He shouted to his followers: '{[' any man dares to lift

imfe Ministers' Association}.

a hand against Mr Wesley he will have to reckon with me first.'" That makes us see the alchemy of the Spirit transforming "lions into lambs," They came to mock; they remained to weep and to pray. Wesley inspired Wilbcrforce and Howard and Livingstone and Booth. Today, all over the world, there are more than thirty million of Wesley's disciples who are spreading his. influence. Tf today Christians are feckless and impotent, the. churches more or less empty it is not because the Power has failed; but because we have displaced Him by idols of our own devising. Wc have wrangled about the letter that killeth and forgotten the Spirit that ma'keth alive.

It will be with Germany as it was ■with us. There is no need l'or us to devise schemes for the education or salvation of Germans-. No doubt today a AVesley is being prepared for the task. The Church is by no means moribund. "Ye have been redeemed not by Nordic blood, but by the blood of Jcw } " declared a Cardinal when the shameful persecutions had begun. Doubtless, a Francis a Philip Neri a AVesley or a Whitelield will be raised up who will bring'the Germans back in pcnitence and hope to the feet of God. That is the hope for us also. But, whoever he be will repeat the experience of AVesley: stones and clods at the beginning ; glory and honour at the end. In his 86th year AVesley recorded of Falmouth: "The last time I was about 10 years ago, I was taken prisoner by an immense mob, gaping and roaring like lions, but how is the tide turned; High and low noV. lined the street from one end of the • * town to the other out of stark love and kindness gaping and staring as if the King were going by." So will it be again. The German evangelists will have an easier task. Christianity begins with: "Blessed, arc the poor in spirit" because humility is receptivity. So long as men are inflated with pride convinced they are supermen destined to rule the they have need of nothing, with a humbledi nation ground by the with all umbled nation ground by the judgments of God. There will be none to say to these new evangelists what Bishop Butler said to AVesley when he claimed to have received extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit: "That is a horrid thing, sir a very horrid thing." It is not Germany alone f but the whole of the Western world that is suffering from a malady of the soul. For that malady there is but. the one eure: the Spirit of God. shed abroad in the heart. In every age when the need was greatest God raised up men of power: "There was a man sent from God whose name was John." Germany's Wesley is now being prepared, and ours, also. Though he tarry, wait for him. ?